Asian Dub Foundation - Music

Music

The 1995 song, Rebel Warrior, was inspired by the 1920s poem, "Bidrohi" by Bengali poet, Kazi Nazrul Islam, an advocate for Indian independence. The song discusses the racial violence and inequality that the group state still plagues their British communities. Asian Dub Foundation have used their music in conjunction with education and social work for youth in the East End of London, as well as other British anti-racism campaigns.

Like other groups in their genre such as Hustlers HC and Fun-Da-Mental, Asian Dub Foundation fuse South Asian instrumentation and lyrics with the dominantly conceived black music genre of rap. Their music is able to signify a disruption in the racial/ethnic boundaries of hip hop. In their song, "Strong Culture", they assert their authenticity as legitimate Asian hip-hop artists, contrary to other popular claims. The line from the song, "I'm not a Black man / This time it's an Asian." likens back to when Asians were considered "Black" by some in the United Kingdom (UK) and often were part of that musical scene as Asian music had not fully emerged yet. Their lyrics call for radical political harmony and they use their music as an organizing tool for cultural politics, endorsing righteousness, social change, and an end to what they perceive as oppression in the UK. They also pursue the issue of the politicisation of the category "Asian," asserting the legitimacy and authenticity of having an Asian identity in the hip-hop world. They redefine the "Asian" category by reconnecting it with an anti-colonial history, as well a current, existing anti-racist struggle.

They challenge the argument that Asians are passive onlookers in popular culture who are hardly involved in the music industry. Their music functions to bridge the black influence with their own Asian style, using such lyrics as "I grab the mic to commence with the mic check. Supply rhymes, man you never heard yet, you've never thought an Asian could do this." Reckoning a traditional hip-hop MC style with their own Asian influence and simultaneously mixing in various other musical styles, thus disbanding the polarisation of the racial terms and addressing the "ongoing racialised violence and inequality evident in everyday experience in their neighbourhood".